compact-yaml-frontmatter

compact-yaml-frontmatter is a skill for Claude Code from alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills. It costs 25 tokens per session (1,093 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for keeping YAML frontmatter, the metadata block at the top of a Markdown file, small and focused. It is intended for documentation, agent skills, and retrieval-based knowledge bases.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing metadata headers for indexed Markdown documents or AI knowledge collections.
Why use it?
It prevents repetitive metadata from taking attention and context space away from the document itself.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Part of the major-ai-skills plugin — 147 skills, 8 plugins shipped together

Good fit Use it when designing metadata headers for indexed Markdown documents or AI knowledge collections.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/compact-yaml-frontmatter
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills --skill compact-yaml-frontmatter
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install major-ai-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 147 skills, 8 plugins.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for compact-yaml-frontmatter

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/compact-yaml-frontmatter/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/compact-yaml-frontmatter)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/compact-yaml-frontmatter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/compact-yaml-frontmatter/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for compact-yaml-frontmatter

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/compact-yaml-frontmatter"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alivirgo/major-ai-skills/compact-yaml-frontmatter.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,093 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00025 $0.01093
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00547
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00219
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00109

Measured yesterday against content hash fa36553db507, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

compact-yaml-frontmatter scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/compact-yaml-frontmatter/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Compact YAML Frontmatter & Knowledge Metadata

Overview

In automated knowledge management, RAG documentation suites, and AI skill repositories, every Markdown file starts with a YAML frontmatter block (--- ... ---).

Unoptimized frontmatter blocks frequently accumulate 15 to 25 lines of redundant metadata (author emails, redundant timestamps, verbose SEO keyword paragraphs, placeholder schemas), consuming 150 to 300 tokens per file. When a RAG retrieval system fetches 10 documents, the agent burns 2,500 tokens purely on metadata headers before reading any actual content.

The Compact YAML Frontmatter Protocol enforces a Lean 3-to-4 Field Standard, delivering maximum indexing signal with minimal token footprint.


Bloated Metadata vs. Lean High-Density Frontmatter

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                 Frontmatter Token Comparison                │
│                                                             │
│  Bloated YAML Frontmatter (240 Tokens per Doc):             │
│  ---                                                        │
│  title: "Comprehensive Guide to Distributed Caching"        │
│  author: "Engineering Architecture Working Group"           │
│  created_at: "2026-08-22T17:55:00.000Z"                     │
│  updated_at: "2026-08-22T17:55:00.000Z"                     │
│  keywords: ["cache", "redis", "distributed", "caching"...]  │
│  category: "Backend Systems Architecture Documentation"     │
│  version: "1.0.4-beta.2"                                    │
│  description: "This comprehensive document provides an..."  │
│  ---                                                        │
│  ↳ 240 tokens billed per document fetched                   │
│                                                             │
│  Lean Compact Frontmatter (42 Tokens - 82.5% Reduction):    │
│  ---                                                        │
│  title: "Distributed Caching (Redis/Memcached)"             │
│  description: "Architecture guide for cache eviction..."   │
│  tags: ["redis", "caching", "architecture"]                 │
│  ---                                                        │
│  ↳ 42 clean tokens, 100% search & retrieval fidelity        │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday Changed · -12 tokens per session fa36553db507
  2. 7d ago First seen · 97 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 3fe8c95ab762

Subscribe to this mod's changes

compact-yaml-frontmatter is a skill published in the GitHub repository alivirgo/Major-AI-Skills (1 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 1,093 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-05.

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